4. Grand Funk RailroadCloser To Home
Wow what a record! Grand Funk had been around for a couple of records and just kept getting better and better and were, to me still to this day, the shining example of what determination could do. These guys grew up in Flint, Michigan, they were like kids, and they just did it their way, got a good manager and just took over the world for a time period, with no real help from anybody. They just worked really hard. They were blues-based, they were soul-based, they were from Michigan, they were listening to Motown and shit. They played rock, but you could hear the soul in the bass player [Mel Schacher] – one of the best rock bass players ever.
Mark Farner the singer, singing in a falsetto for all the world like a Motown diva. Really corny lyrics, like super boy-meets-girl kind of thing, but with this old black guy blues that none of these white kids knew anything about. But it didn’t matter, because they had such a swinging section. I mean, talk about a combo; you take any one of these guys out of the band and they wouldn’t sound anything like that band. There were only three of them, so they were integral to each other. Their drummer Don Brewer, he was fucking amazing. All hard rock and all soul-based hard rock and blues-based hard rock, is played from the standpoint where it was so close to the original soul, that they had it, it was still within their life experience to actually see all those original Motown soul people. It didn’t look like they were influenced by any other rock band, I could never figure it out. Of course they got their major success from We’re an American Band but that’s like way past their prime I think.
